Sports in Houston

The first time we lived in Houston, the Houston major league baseball team had only been in existence for a year.  They were known as the “Colt 45’s.”  They played in Colt’s Stadium, and hastily built stadium that wasn’t much more than an enlarged high school stadium, but the great teams came there and I saw some of the great ball players I had admired in my youth.  Stan Musial is the one I remembered most.  He was in his last year with the Cardinals.  I was amazed at the way this man went all out on a routine fly ball.  I also saw Sandy Koufax pitch a one hitter. I got to see the great Willie Mays.  I even saw Pete Rose when he was a rookie.

Quite often I went to the games with Truman. Of course I’m a teetotaler, but beer flows freely at the ball park.  One night Truman told the beer guy that I wanted to buy a beer.  I turned red and declined the opportunity.  I looked over at Truman he was broken up with laughter, which was a funny experience within itself.

When we returned to Houston, Colt’s stadium was gone, and the team had become the Astros.  Astros tickets were easy for us to come by.  For one thing, the Astros were terrible at that point in time.  They were cynically called the “Lastros.”   But the good teams kept coming into town.  These were the days of players like Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan who moved over to Cincinnati from Houston. We were also there during Hank Aaron’s quest to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, although I don’t remember actually see Hank hit a ball out of the park.

 We had a brother who had access to all the season tickets help by General Motors car dealerships in the Houston area.  If we wanted to attend a baseball game, we just called him.  He would see that we got tickets and they would be good seats.

And the team was playing in the Astrodome, which was billed as the world’s ninth wonder.  We went to several events there, but the biggest crowd I ever saw wasn’t at a sporting event.   Elliott and some of his friends got tickets to a demolition derby.  He wasn’t driving at that time, so I went down to the dome to pick the kids up. It was toward the end and they let me inside without paying.  It was the biggest crowd I ever saw in the Dome.

One year Elliott played in the pep band for the Houston Rockets.  I would drive down to the Summit to pick him up after the games.  The ticket takers usually let me watch the fourth quarter without charging me.  One night I walked out by the side of Bill Walton.  I thought I came up to about his waistline, and I’m not short.  We saw lots of sporting events in Houston and we didn’t pay a whole lot to see them.